A few years ago, post-rock was the music of the future. With bands such as Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Icelandic heavyweight Sigur Ros leading the scene, it seemed like lengthy, crescendoing guitar instrumentals would be the soundtrack of choice for catharsis-seeking teens and meditative filmmakers alike well into the new millennium. But with an exception or two — Explosions in the Sky’s score for “Friday Night Lights” and the continued success of Sigur Ros’ pro-vocal, pro-glacier epics — the post-rock bubble has long since burst.

As one of the few bands to ascend beyond the genre’s aesthetic and commercial boundaries, it’s no surprise that Sigur Ros’ latest single breaks new ground. Or rather, old ground. The appropriately titled “Gobbledigook” (Icelandic for “Gobbledigook”), which the band released for free on its website today along with an NSFW video, steps away from the band’s usual iciness in favor of an acoustic campfire vibe, all click-clacking, double-time drumming and frantic guitar strums. It’s the sort of rough, tribal music that’s helped nature-centric bands such as Animal Collective and the Dodos replace post-rock as the outsider sound of choice but Sigur Ros are hardly copycats.

Unlike Animal Collective’s lo-fi romps, “Gobbledigook” maintains the band’s usual pristine production, letting singer Jónsi Birgisson bounce over a bed of high-pitched harmonies. His melody is both catchy and high-flying, avoiding the aforementioned bands’ frequent problem of burying their singers. It does the group good to add a little energy to the mix: the song clocks in at a scant three minutes, which is barely enough for an intro in typical Sigur Ros time. Older fans might find it dizzying but for a band once willing to repeat itself ad infinitum (or at least for eight-minute intervals), it’s a breath of fresh air. The band’s fifth album, “Með Suð Í Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust,” is due June 23. More of this, please.

–David Greenwald

Photo of lead singer Jon Thor Birgisson by Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times

Call us naive, but last week’s call from Chromeo looking for a female drummer warmed our hearts a bit, as in “Coed rock out, sweet!” Turns out female drummers with cellulite need not apply. Soundboard got more info from Chromeo’s representation about its search for a drummer on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” and let’s just say it’s not exactly NOW-endorsed. But then again, what else can be expected from two dudes whose album cover looked like this?

Here’s the ad, with strange wording (i.e., “the look of legs”) preserved:

“Are you available to come to a casting call on June 3rd? We are casting 6 girls for their talent and the look of legs for this bit. The casting call would be to basically have you play a practice pad and let us take some Polaroid’s. We are looking for someone that can play marching drum, as each gal will have a snare (only requirement for the casting call is you wear shorts or a short dress so we can photo your legs.) You would be performing with Chromeo on our outdoor stage on June 17th. We will also want to get your costume specs. It will also be good to have you on file for anything else we do here at Kimmel. My info is here below. Casting will be from 12:00 - 4pm, June 3rd.”

So is this a little creepy or just par for the course? With our bellies still full of Mem Day bbq, do we care what Chromeo thinks about legs or anything else?

–Margaret Wappler

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with “American Idol” over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on “Eurovision,” their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of “Idol.”The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday’s elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia (”Believe”) and Sweden (”Hero”) are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the “Eurovision” crown with Ani Lorak’s catchy pop song borne from club music roots (”Shady Lady”) .

“Shady Lady” seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a “hot” lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

–Charlie Amter

Is Los Angeles experiencing a rap renaissance? With rappers such as Blu, U-N-I and the group Pacific Division making much noise in the local underground rap scene, we haven’t seen this much talent brewing at once in this genre in a while.

Hip-hop’s Internet taste-makers have long heralded the bubbling SoCal indie rap world, in the wake of the Bay Area’s Hyphy movement. Even Billboard Magazine has recently taken notice.

The Key Club was packed Wednesday night with a crowd that came to see the L.A. New Wave funk-punk outfit J*Davey, but it was the live-wire showcase of PacDiv MCs Mibbs, Like and BeYoung (left to right, above) that lit up the room.

The Palmdale trio’s self-released album “Sealed for Freshness” (The Blendtape) made most of the rap world take notice in 2006. Several publications heralded them as the next group to break out of L.A. Their style reaches back to Pharcyde but with an eye on materialism, rapping more about money and sneakers than lost loves.

The songs performed Wednesday, including “Paper” and “Women Problems,” poke fun at everyday dilemmas and provide the ego trips familiar to rap fans but there’s very little of that gangsta bravado that signifies L.A.’s rap culture.

The throwback-titled F.A.T Boys ‘08 (standing for Fashionable Artistic Trendsetters, a polite nod to Kanye West, no doubt) defines their image with the hook, “Pocketful of papers, sneakers on my feet/I’m a F.A.T boy.”

On a different plane, but still hard to pin down is the club act J*Davey. Led by the mohawked Miss Jack Davey (pictured above), who’s backed up by a hype-man, bass player, drummer, drum machine player and an assortment of synthesizers, the funk-punk outfit were clearly favorites of many in attendance.

Davey, whose voice recalls Erykah Badu when she sings and Lauryn Hill when she raps, is also a bit like Lene from the group Aqua when she does the punk-heavy numbers. The convincing front woman left the stage midway through the 50-minute set in what seemed like a Diva move, only to return with a new outfit: a tight spandex ensemble, which no self-respecting lady performer within five feet of a drum machine should be without.

With all the funky synths and melodic singing, Davey couldn’t exactly find her flow. She blamed the audience for not giving her the energy she wanted and then commanded the crowd to dance at certain points. For “Touch of Fate,” she encouraged audience participation but it didn’t come off exactly as she instructed. During one of her last songs, she went for broke: “OK, this is the part of the show where you take your clothes off.” No one did, but a few members of the crowd did hop on stage to dance.

–Post and photos by Camilo Smith

For a band that counts songs about abusive fathers and interracial relationships in its catalog, one might expect Everclear’s Memorial Day gig at the Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to have more than a twinge of irony. We talked with the band’s frontman, Art Alexakis, about the show, its political implications and Jesus Christ’s party affiliation.

So, how does a band go about booking a show at Guantanamo Bay, of all places?

We’ve done a lot of booking for the military, we’ve played Japan, Korea, Guam and a bunch of bases in the States, and the guy who books that kind of stuff came to us with Guantanamo Bay. Usually, if that day’s open, it’s a no-brainer, but I took a day to think about the implications of this one. Not because of what other people would think, but for me. If you check online, I’ve been pretty vehemently anti this war, have been from the beginning. I marched, did the whole thing. But I’ve always been pro-troop. I feel for people who’ve made this commitment. That’s their job to do it and I respect and honor that.

Are they going to let you see any other parts of Cuba while you’re there?

I asked them if I could go into Cuba, and they told me no. I get to go to the fence that separates it from the base. I would love to go. I want to go to Havana big time. It’s a moment out of time with all these ’50s cars driving around. You know that when the Castro brothers die, its going to turn into Disneyland over there. I wanted to see Cuba, but I also wanted to go over there to get a pulse of the soldiers that were there about what happened [in the prison]: What their family’s viewpoint on being at Guantanamo is about, and are they proud to be there? Do they think they’re doing a good thing? Are they ashamed? They’re put there, and there isn’t much you can do about it in the armed forces. I’ve got a song I’m thinking about playing there for the first time, called “Jesus Was a Democrat.”

Wow, really? What kind of ideas led up to that?

It’s actually a pretty flagrant challenge to the conservative view of Jesus. Even if you’re not a Christian, if you read Jesus’ words in the Bible, there’s nothing conservative about him. He was a full-on liberal. There’s a line in it that goes, “Jesus would be locked up in Guantanamo Bay if he were alive today.” I consider myself Christian but not in any traditional sense. I was brought up in a serious evangelical home, and always had problems with Christianity, like there was something great there, but that I wasn’t seeing it. I see why most people, especially young people, are afraid of Christians. There’s a line in the song that says, “I wonder if Jesus is as afraid of Christians as I am?” They’re scary!

How do you think it’ll go over in Guantanamo Bay, a place you cite in the song as imprisoning Jesus?

What happened in Guantanamo Bay, that was blood-chilling to me. It goes to show you that anyone can get caught up in it, anyone can be the bad guy. Any collection of people from any culture. It was sobering for a lot of people. It was sobering for me. I’ve got a daughter who’s 16, and I don’t think she’d ever go into the service, and I’d fight her if she did, but if she does, what’s my perspective then?

I’m just trying to be compassionate and put myself in the other guy’s shoes. This song is pretty angry. I think we’re in better place now than in ‘88, when I worked on the Dukakis campaign canvassing, but I was so pissed at Republicans, that conservatives co-opted the term “family values”; they made being a liberal a bad word. I’m an ACLU card-carrying liberal. I have no bones about it. I might be conservative on some things, but you’re going to tell me that to have family values I have to glom on to your way of thinking? No way!

At least now I’m not alone. The great thing about [Barack] Obama, he’s unabashedly a liberal or a progressive. Isn’t that great? Even in the Clinton administration, no one was using the word “liberal,” they were using the “moderate” word. Seems like in the last few elections, the right has pulled the left to the center, and now it seems like the left has pulled right center. [John] McCain started playing ball with the Bush administration, thinking he could ride his coattails if he got the call. Now, it’s dragging him down.

You mentioned that you had some reservations about playing the Guantanamo Bay show. What were they?

This has nothing to do with other people’s perceptions. It’s about me. My wife said that if you’re going over there for the troops, that’s the right reason; if you’re going to see what it’s all about, that’s the right reason. I have an opportunity to go to a place that a lot of people don’t go to. There is controversy there, but it’s not like I’m going to go waterboard anybody. I’m going to look. I’m going to see what they’re gonna show me. They’re going to put a glossy face on it, but my main reason is to go get people’s perspectives on what they thought that place was about.

Aside from whole torturing aspect, there’s a history there and I love history. Whenever something’s on TV about Cuba, I shush people. I’m fascinated by people living technologically out of time, and their perspectives. I think the revolution there got lost, but I’m fascinated by it and want to see how and why it went awry.

Do you think you’ll get an accurate picture of the place from your time there?

I’m going to go and be positive. I can piss people off if I try to. I’m really good at it. I don’t want to do that. You get more out of people if they feel safe and secure instead of defensive. I want to ask them, “Were you here when that stuff was going down? Is it still going down?” I’m going to ask questions, and I can ask them good-naturedly. I want to get as much info as possible. I’d love to bring my teenage daughter. Some of these kids there are only two or three years older than my daughter. I meet kids that age every day at shows.

Do you ever wonder if young fans might think differently about Guantanamo Bay if a favorite band played there, that it can’t be that bad if Everclear had a show there?

I thought of that, but of the letters I’ve been getting, I’ve only gotten four negative ones, and I think it’s all from the same guy. He’s comparing what we’re doing to going to Auschwitz or Dachau, which I have serious issues with. I’m going to provide entertainment, which is seriously important to American kids in a place where, I think it’s fair to say, most of them don’t want to be there. Those kids in Iraq, they don’t want to be there. When people ask me questions, I answer honestly. That’s what we’re all here for, to hopefully learn from each other. I’m going in with curiosity. Is it a dark, scary place, or a bright, sunny place with big, scary fences and dogs? I don’t know what it is.

– August Brown

Photo by Ethan Miller / Getty Images

For all you wannabe Mo Tuckers, Cindy Blackmans and Susie Ibarras out there, your time has come. The electrofunk duo Chromeo is looking for a lady drummer to perform “Fancy Footwork” with them on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on June 17. What are the requirements? According to the call out sent by a band representative, you need to be in the studio “roughly 2pm to 8pm” and you need to be down for “some costuming and movement + snare drum playing.” Oh, and you “don’t need to be Sheila E. or anything.” Sounds like an easy way to make $308 to me. To be considered, contact Mac Burrus from “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” at jklmusic@gmail.com.

– Margaret Wappler

Photo by May Truong

Most high school seniors spend prom night spiking the punch and trying to make nice with their dates. James Pants was too busy convincing Peanut Butter Wolf to come record shopping.

“We met up and I chauffeured him around Austin,” says the DJ-musician, who goes by James Singleton when he’s not spinning vinyl. A few years and a handful of mix CDs later, Peanut Butter Wolf - he head of Stones Throw Records - asked him to a record a cover of goofball ’80s jam “Grandmaster Lover,” and a record deal soon followed. For Singleton, a hip-hop aficionado with jazz roots who plays drums, guitar and keyboards as well as manning the turntables, it was a perfect fit.

“They had elements of weirdness that I really liked. It seemed like the label didn’t take itself too seriously,” he says. Neither does the humble Singleton, whose DJ name stems from his wife dubbing him “fancy pants,” even if his debut album, “Welcome,” is too gritty and offbeat to be runway-ready. It’s also mostly sample-free, with the instrumentation provided by Singleton himself “out of necessity.”

“I live in Spokane, Washington,” he says, “There’s really no scene here.” Equal parts hip-hop, dance and soul grooves, the album’s 16 tracks were hand-picked by Peanut Butter Wolf out of 100 recordings.

“I’m not very good at finishing songs,” Singleton says, “but I’m pretty good at starting them.”

||| Live: James Pants will open for Jamie Lidell at the El Rey on May 29 and 30, with a “Welcome” release party at Turntable Lab that Friday afternoon.

||| Listen: “Ka$h”

-David Greenwald

Photo by Jake Green.

[Buzz Bands blogger Kevin Bronson has the week off.]

There are plenty of gasp-worthy moments in the French electronica duo Justice’s video for “Stress”: when one of its becrucifixed teenage bangers, all notably black, Middle Eastern or North African, gropes a woman in a train station; when another smacks a cafe owner in the face with a bottle; when the whole gang whales on a police officer with his own baton. But the most telling moment is its one instance of levity; the gang steals a car and, supremely annoyed by Justice’s hit “D.A.N.C.E.” on the radio, kicks the dashboard to pieces.

It’s a clever, self-deprecating gag, but entirely symptomatic of the spirit of this horrifically compelling video from director Romain Gavras, which debuted two weeks ago to instant controversy on Kanye West’s blog. The clip’s merits lie solely in the aesthetic power of its allusions and references. In this case, the video gestures at the 2005 riots that swept through the Parisian suburbs and painfully underscored the deep division of race, class and religion in what many outsiders saw as a model society.

This is a worthy topic for a band whose music is as polyglot as Justice’s is to explore in film. The depth and breadth of the video’s violence will be familiar to anyone who watched the television reports on the ‘05 riots in many of Paris’ far-flung and ethnically marginalized outer neighborhoods. The problem is deciphering what team Justice, Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay, is actually exploring in its allusions to it.

The most likely explanation is that the video is a meta-commentary on the media’s vilifying (or romanticizing) of street realities. These particular bouts of violence are so villainous, so macabrely cartoonish that the “Stress” video can’t be expected to create any kind of sympathy or understanding with the stars or the off-screen allegory. So it can only be assumed that Justice is mocking public perceptions of minority youths as thugs.

But to what ends is Justice doing this? We didn’t need Justice to remind us that xenophobia begets violence and that violence and racism are both often inscrutable. The video’s willful refusal to encourage any understanding of why this is happening only leaves our shock (and rapt attention) to the imagery.

The parting voice snippet where one of the kids asks, in French, “Does filming this get you off, you S.O.B.?” smacks of cheap insight. Yes, Justice, it probably does. But that’s all it does. The questions of “Do media desensitize their audience to violence and can they exploit people?” have been pretty thoroughly answered by now; Justice admittedly isn’t probing this mess any deeper. Maybe Justice should field that kid’s question in regards to its own motivations here.

The decision to dress the kids in Justice-logo jackets is a similarly cryptic gesture parading as terms of debate: Is Justice identifying with the thugs? Admitting its own complicity in the social problems that cause violence? Or, perhaps, simply associating itself with such powerful imagery and passing off its lack of engagement as an open-ended artistic question? Stress indeed.

With such a hugely powerful array of visual ideas here, it’d be a shame if Justice’s only goal was to make fun of the nightly news. And even if the point was to sarcastically say,  ”OK, media, this is what you imagine minority youths to be like, so we’ll give you a freakish caricature that you’ll probably eat up,” is Justice the right band to do that?

The duo admitted in a press release about the clip that “we have neither the intention nor the legitimacy to express ourselves, in any in-depth way, on social issues.” If that’s truly the case, then Justice has made an irresponsible and intentionally thoughtless video that does nothing to further understanding, empathy or clarity of the issues they gesture at here. That makes “Stress” a powerful but truly failed piece of art. “Opening up debate” is a good start for a piece of art’s goals — it’s the height of laziness to call it an end point.

But if it’s primarily entertainment and there is no “meaning,” or even an admission that Justice can’t help us here, then the duo needs to take off the Wayfarers and have a long, dark night of the soul reflecting on their vantage point in referencing these serious and worthy issues. “We always left it up to the public to watch it, or to ignore it, without trying to influence opinions one way or the other,” the statement concludes, “in line with the function, as we see it, of art and entertainment.”

That makes the wasted opportunity of this video all the more depressing. It’s not the violence itself that’s the most upsetting quality in the “Stress” video — it’s the pointlessness of it. The public does need artists to make sense of issues and influence opinion for the common good. Artists who claim such potent imagery as their own, but offer nothing in the way of engagement or inquisitiveness with the material, only leave us with numbing rhetorical questions and gentle pan-outs of burning cars.

– August Brown

For me, middle age officially begins on June 7 of this year. That’s when Prince, whose sexy-utopian music defined my college nights, turns 50. And I’ve just learned that any attempt to hide from my mid-40s reality will be further hindered by the 50th birthday of Jello Biafra, another formative influence, just 10 days after the Purple One.

Jello’s contributions to the punk rock canon aren’t as lauded as Joey Ramone’s or Johnny Rotten’s, but he’s been a guiding light (well, more like a guiding car alarm) for Bay Area punks since the turn of the ’80s. As lead provocateur in the Dead Kennedys, Biafra helped invent the American take on political punk.

When I first heard the band’s debut, “Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables,” in 1980, I was a Clash-loving high school girl trying to rebel, but not sure how. The name “Dead Kennedys” alone sent a nervous ripple through my Catholic heart. But it was the music, and most of all Jello’s yowl, that secured loyalty — ripping satirical songs like “Holiday in Cambodia” and “Kill the Poor” were as absurd as Monty Python, way more confrontational than the anti-nuke rallies then on offer for budding lefties, and (in its own ugly way) as catchy as the Beach Boys. No point in resisting. Soon, I’d discover mosh pits and just how sweaty shirtless hard-core boys got in them.

The band’s sound got harder and faster, then more experimental, on subsequent releases. Biafra’s thinking grew more complex too, but he never gave up one millimeter of edge. After enduring an obscenity trial for bundling a sexually graphic poster created by Swiss surrealist HR Giger inside 1985’s “Frankenchrist” LP, the DKs eventually signed off; subsequent encounters between Biafra and his former bandmates would be marred by conflicts in court.

Biafra evolved into a post-punk amalgam of Allan Kaprow and Lenny Bruce, staging hilarious anarchist interventions wherever he went. In 2000, he contended with Ralph Nader for the Green Party’s presidential nomination (he’d also run for mayor of San Francisco in 1979, at age 21), delivering a well-received speech at the party’s nominating convention. He’s done political reporting and commentary for Indymedia, released a bunch of spoken word albums and helmed Alternative Tentacles, the underground label he and DK’s guitarist East Bay Ray co-founded in 1979.

He’s also continued to play punk rock. Lately, his band has been the Melvins – a super-heavy band and the perfect match for Jello’s jeremiads.

Alternative Tentacles is throwing a big party at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall to celebrate Jello’s half-century of causing trouble, so punks old and young might want to plan a getaway to the Bay for June 16 and 17. The birthday man himself will play with the Melvins, and debut a new band that includes some other semi-legendary old punks. Full info here.

– Ann Powers

Photo by Erin Lubin

Sure, your garage band is big in Cleveland, but how big?

For decades, tracking the regional success of up-and-coming acts was a spooky art in the music industry (and one with plenty of smoke and mirrors), but that changed with the 1991 advent of the SoundScan era and its stricter science of counting units sold nationwide and in individual markets.

Still, Nielsen SoundScan ain’t cheap, so true indie labels and artists couldn’t always afford its math. Now, TuneCore.com is helping a bit: Starting June 11, the site will offer – for a flat rate – something called “daily sales trending reports.” (How punk rock is that?) It’s only for iTunes, but it still sounds useful to bands clawing their way into the national scene. Here’s their pitch, via a press release that will be released later today:

“Through TuneCore, bands can download trending data for how many sales took place each day, by song or by album, by day, and by ZIP Code each week a la carte for $2.99 a week. This is the first time in history independent musicians can download this type of statement. Every Wednesday, the previous week’s (Monday-Sunday) worth of daily sales data will be available for a flat fee.”

The file will display songs and albums by title, artist and label, how many units they sold in any given ZIP Code and the day they sold. All seven days’ worth of data are included for as many albums associated with a customer’s account for the a la carte price of $2.99 per week.

You can find TuneCore here.

– Geoff Boucher